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Many in the "Message", the name given for the cult following of William Branham and its many splinter groups, are familiar with the name F. F. Bosworth. Fred Francis Bosworth was a minister who traveled with Branham, touring all across the country in the Post WWII Faith Healing movement. It was Bosworth who challenged Rev. Best in Houston, where Branham's controversial "halo" photograph was taken.

But few are aware that Bosworth himself was a faith healer who had a longer-lasting and more successful ministry. The "Bosworth Brothers Campaigns" made news across the nation for several years until one of Bosworth's "healed" died of the diseases he was "healed" from.

Fewer still are aware that Bosworth co-founded the Assemblies of God in Hot Springs Arkansas, the city where Ku Klux Klan leader Roy E. Davis was extradited from the Jeffersonville, Indiana area on charges of grand theft and connection to murder.

But until recently, almost no one was aware that Roy E. Davis' "Missionary Baptist Church" in Jeffersonville was actually a Pentecostal church, or that Branham's "Branham Tabernacle" was actually started by Roy E. Davis on Watt Street in Jeffersonville. Branham uses the phrase "Baptist minister" directed towards himself in such a way that the casual listener would mistakenly believe that he was part of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The past several days, we've been reviewing Roy E. Davis' connection to Shreveport, Louisiana, where Reverend Jack Moore (Branham's promoter and campaign manager) was a well-known contractor and pastor of the Life Tabernacle. About two years before Davis' arrest for grand theft, the Shreveport newspaper published an article describing Roy Davis in the Bossier City -- just outside of Shreveport -- for an Assemblies of God meeting -- The same branch of the Pentecostal faith that F. F. Bosworth helped establish, and that Jack Moore would have been affiliated.

According to the newspaper article, Davis was also in "lecture work" (Davis was the official lecturer for the 1915 Klan according to other newspaper articles), and one of the national directors for "Fundamentalists of the World."

It is even more interesting that Davis was mentioned as connected to John Roach Straton. Straton was a notable minister in history. He was from Georgia, where the Ku Klux Klan was reborn in 1915, and eventually made his way to New York City to fight the Dancing Saloons. He was a "faith healer" and prohibitionist during the 1920's. As the prohibitionist movement grew stronger, Straton would have been well acquainted with the early leaders of the movement. Congressman William D. Upshaw, who is largely responsible for spreading the temperance movement, would have been speaking against alcohol in the many of the same circles.

Was it at this meeting or through this organization that Roy E. Davis met Jack Moore and F. F. Bosworth? Is this why Davis chose the Shreveport area for his highly publicized Ku Klux Klan recruitment campaigns? Was Davis going to choose Straton to lead the religious structure of his Ku Klux Klan organization? Did he choose Branham to take lead because Straton had died?

New articles added to our Roy E. Davis research page: The Times Fri, Apr 23, 1937